d Hera. They covered the Acropolis
with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their
fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So,
too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high
honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid
conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as
Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical
weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.

The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two
thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to
women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on
democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of
women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and
woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has
added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19]

[19] JAMES DONALDSON, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient
Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians_, Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1907.

From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative
sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and
guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities
of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even
negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most
learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the
Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization,
women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of
dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime
each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual
actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in
heaven.

But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered
around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions
under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely
freed. Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue;
chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end
in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughou